- The Report has in fact been read by Ministers - and the Great Bottler himself in particular - and so, to all intents and purposes is ready for public consumption. But they are resisting publication because ...
- It is a savage indictment of the architecture that the Government are currently proposing for their ID card scheme.
i.e. William Heath's take on it is absolutely spot on.
But, as I posted earlier, I am less certain that his 'seasoned Whitehall-watcher' has necessarily got it right in supposing that the Report is destined for some hinterland of long grass deep in the bowels of the Treasury. Rather I think that the Great Bottler reckons the Report may yet prove to be a potential ace up his sleeve.
Whatever else he may be he is a mightily shrewd politician - after all he commissioned the Crosby Forum in the first place when still Chancellor and you don't go to that trouble unless you're 90% confident that it will say what you want. Even then he will have actively considered the electoral downside of running with the ID cards project. His plan therefore was to make sure he had a get-out in place just in case the whole ID cards palaver went belly-up. Of course he can't have reckoned that, on the margins of the HMRC fiasco, it would do so quite so spectacularly. So at the moment his hands are tied because - call it control-freakery, hubris, pride, whatever you will - he can't take the risk of being controlled by events.
Nevertheless, timing is all. So, down the line when his political weather is a little bit sunnier and (always assuming if) he has regained some measure of control, he may well pull the proverbial rabbit of the Crosby Report out of the hat to justify scrapping ID cards, particularly if the prevailing winds tell him that to do so would be politically/electorally advantageous.
We shall see but, if nothing else, it's good to see David Davis sniffing around the issue - at least someone in Parliament is!
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